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Eclipse project releases major update of open source IDE

The Eclipse project has announced the 2010 release train, codenamed Helios, …

The Eclipse project has announced the Helios release train, a major update of the open source Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) and many of its key components.

Due to the modularity of the software and the diversity of its community, Eclipse is developed like a platform. There are a multitude of independently-developed components that supply specific kinds of functionality. The most widely-used components are collected into a set of standard Eclipse packages that are targeted towards specific kinds of development.

This is the seventh consecutive year that the Eclipse community has undertaken a coordinated release of the core components and packages. The 2010 release, which is codenamed Helios, includes 39 individual projects and 12 separate packages. The packages are available for download from the Eclipse Web site.

"Besides the feat of coordinating such a large development effort, Helios introduces important innovations in areas such as Git support, Linux development and JavaScript support," said Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich in a statement. "Congratulations to everyone for another great release."

One of the most significant features introduced in this release is the new Eclipse Marketplace, which gives users a simple interface for finding new plugins and components. It makes third-party plugins a lot more discoverable and simplifies the installation process. To install PyDev, for example, I just had to type in a search query and hit the "install" button, whereas in the previous version I would have needed to copy and paste the PyDev package URL into the Eclipse update manager.

Another nice arrival in Helios is the new Linux IDE package for C and C++ development. It includes tight integration with the autotools build system and support for popular Linux development utilities such as SystemTap and Valgrind. Some interesting external components that were updated during this release cycle include a JavaScript debugging framework and an improved Git plugin that brings tightly-integrated distributed version control features to the IDE.

I tested the Helios Eclipse Java development package on my desktop computer, which is running Ubuntu 10.04 and has a six-core i7 980X. The new version of Eclipse takes roughly five seconds to start up on this system and uses several hundred megabytes when idle. Although the IDE's impressive feature set continues to grow, it's still very heavy on system resources.

The Eclipse Foundation has published a series of video demos that showcase the new features of Helios. For additional information about the projects that participated in the release, you can view the Helios project list.

It's good to see that Eclipse finally lets you use it with a 64bit JVM on windows (without having to find some obscure link)... that caused me lots of problems just this week (64bit JDK, and it'll simply claim there are no JVMs).

It'd be nice, though, if Eclipse could actually bother to release an installer for Windows. Being just given a zip file seems really unprofessional and amateurish. I'm also not particularly a fan of the whole 'workspace' folder, nor how Eclipse fails to properly set files to 'hidden' on Windows for hidden files.

It'd be nice, though, if Eclipse could actually bother to release an installer for Windows. Being just given a zip file seems really unprofessional and amateurish. I'm also not particularly a fan of the whole 'workspace' folder, nor how Eclipse fails to properly set files to 'hidden' on Windows for hidden files.

Please. It's not like the Eclipse developers give a damn about Windows users or anything. Be glad you get a zip file.

Being treated like a second-class citizen (and their unfailing reliance on GNU tools that I hate) is pretty much why I avoid Eclipse and stick with Visual Studio.

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Or get bigger ram. Or clean up HD. Or defrag. Or stop other processes. Or reduce the workspace. etc etc etc.

Or get bigger ram. Or clean up HD. Or defrag. Or stop other processes. Or reduce the workspace. etc etc etc.

I'm rather sure that if my computer can play Crysis, and all the newest games fine, it should be able to run Eclipse. Instead it tends to freeze every couple of lines while I'm attempting to type code in order to tell me "System.ou" is not proper Java.

Gee, really? I'm not even done with that line, and yet you decide its important to be unresponsive and check the syntax RIGHT NOW. This isn't my only gripe with Eclipse, either. Everytime I have to use it for some project, I feel like shooting myself.

I'm tired of hard-wrapping code with carriage returns after a fixed number of columns. I'm tired of staring at a source code postage stamp in the middle of my 30" LCD. The web should have served as a good example for the value of encoding content in a fashion that will adapt for display on any number of output devices and screen sizes. I say, leave source code lines be as long as they would be naturally/semantically, and dynamically wrap them for display on whatever screen the developer is using at the time.

The single most important MISSING feature is the ability to tab between open files. Or is it fixed yet? I hate to drop the keyboard and use the mouse to navigate between files. Thankfully there's Netbeans which in many if not all ways is superior to Eclipse.

I have been using Eclipse for C++ development on my EeePC, Atom-based PC, with 2G RAM adn 20G flash, and it runs just fine. It did not load instantly, but it did not take much longer than on the quoted 6-core i5, and I'd definitely say it took far less than Visual Studio 2005 takes on my company's dual-core laptop.

I have been running Gallileo these past few days on a Pentium M laptop on quite a large project, and though it took quite a long time to index all the source tree, it ran perfectly OK after startup.

Yeah, it takes up more than 20MB RAM. But why should I care? It's not running on a cellphone, and it uses but a fraction of the 2MB RAM that computers have today as a minimum.

Eclipse now runs fine with Java6 on almost anything available today (and certainly on anything Windows7-capable). The excessive resources and general slowness are echoes from the past. I am pretty sure VS2010 would crawl on the type of hardware that gave Eclipse that reputation.

I really dislike development in Eclipse. Plugins are implemented horribly. I've been doing a lot of GWT (Google Web Toolkit) development over the past year, and I started with it in Eclipse, because that was what Google targeted as their development platform. Well, sometimes Eclipse would just decide that GWT didn't exist anymore for me. This was a completely arbitrary thing, where suddenly some dependency would disappear, and I couldn't debug or run a test properly, and nothing I could do would make it come back. Uninstalling and reinstalling the necessary plugins wouldn't work. In the end I found that oftentimes creating a new workspace, then going through the (somewhat laborious) process of setting up GWT again, and then finally importing my old code would work (I just checked, and I have 7 separate workspace folders because of this). In the end I moved to Netbeans, whose plugin system seems rock solid. Mind you, I've done a lot of Java based work in both Eclipse and Netbeans over the years, and have learned to avoid Eclipse as much as possible due to this tendency for things to randomly break.

I am looking forward to doing some Android development, but I hope that the community has made it easy to do in Netbeans, because I definitely don't want to do it in Eclipse.

It'd be nice, though, if Eclipse could actually bother to release an installer for Windows. Being just given a zip file seems really unprofessional and amateurish. I'm also not particularly a fan of the whole 'workspace' folder, nor how Eclipse fails to properly set files to 'hidden' on Windows for hidden files.

Please. It's not like the Eclipse developers give a damn about Windows users or anything. Be glad you get a zip file.

Being treated like a second-class citizen (and their unfailing reliance on GNU tools that I hate) is pretty much why I avoid Eclipse and stick with Visual Studio.

Quote:

Or get bigger ram. Or clean up HD. Or defrag. Or stop other processes. Or reduce the workspace. etc etc etc.

I don't need to do any of that with Visual Studio.

Firstly, Eclipse is free, VS isn't (ignoring the express edition).

Secondly, if you think Windows is a second class citizen with Eclipse I'd be curious to know what the first class citizen is. It runs far far worse on both Linux and Mac.

As for me, I'd like to see the CDT guys drop their custom C++ parser and adopt Clang so we can get some of the hot stuff coming in Xcode 4 on Linux.

If I recall correctly, Eclipse's memory use scales with the number of opened projects. I don't mind if it takes time to startup, I only expect to start it once a month or less.

What has bothered me in the past, and has held me back from using it more, is that it seems to get swapped out in Windows. Every morning it appeared slow as mollasses to switch to existing tabs or perform other common operations. This was for less than a dozen C++ projects and <100kLOCS in my workspace, and less than a dozen opened files, less than 10kLOCS total.

I also regret the lack of features of the integrated editor (such as word wrap), but I understand that VIM integration is mature (I'm still learning VIM, coming from an Emacs background)

Eclipse has a bad reputation of being annoyingly slow for simple operations. I wonder if this is due to my setup (windows, C++) and if other people, such as Java devs on Linux, have a smooth experience.

The single most important MISSING feature is the ability to tab between open files. Or is it fixed yet? I hate to drop the keyboard and use the mouse to navigate between files. Thankfully there's Netbeans which in many if not all ways is superior to Eclipse.

Or get bigger ram. Or clean up HD. Or defrag. Or stop other processes. Or reduce the workspace. etc etc etc.

I'm rather sure that if my computer can play Crysis, and all the newest games fine, it should be able to run Eclipse. Instead it tends to freeze every couple of lines while I'm attempting to type code in order to tell me "System.ou" is not proper Java.

Gee, really? I'm not even done with that line, and yet you decide its important to be unresponsive and check the syntax RIGHT NOW. This isn't my only gripe with Eclipse, either. Everytime I have to use it for some project, I feel like shooting myself.

Good thing I'm getting away from Java land and more into OS land.

Probably a problem with your system somewhere. We use Eclipse with Quad-Core machines running just fine. At home it also runs on a Dual-Core machine, again just fine.

May be, just may be, if everyone else manages to run something ok, perhaps there's a problem with you machine...?

The single most important MISSING feature is the ability to tab between open files. Or is it fixed yet? I hate to drop the keyboard and use the mouse to navigate between files. Thankfully there's Netbeans which in many if not all ways is superior to Eclipse.

Is CTRL+Page up/down what you are looking for? Or maybe CTRL+e?

Neither of these allow me to quickly navigate to precious file as with Netbeans or Visual Studio. In fact, using the mouse would be faster! Another annoyance, Eclipse wont allow the tab key to be bound to either of your suggested keys!

Eclipse is slow to start but runs fine under Linux on a 1.2Ghz Pentium M with 2Gb memory. Starts and runs snappily on my current Core 5-based laptop with 4Gb. I was somewhat surprised, actually, after hearing so much about how slow it's supposed to be. The default workspace gives a ridiculously small area for the editor, but closing all those windows I don't normally need fixed that. Still, I have to look at the Vim-integration; that's my default editor for everything else.

The single most important MISSING feature is the ability to tab between open files. Or is it fixed yet? I hate to drop the keyboard and use the mouse to navigate between files. Thankfully there's Netbeans which in many if not all ways is superior to Eclipse.

If I recall correctly, Eclipse's memory use scales with the number of opened projects. I don't mind if it takes time to startup, I only expect to start it once a month or less....

Partially, but also and perhaps more importantly it scales with the number of active plugins. Here is where the default views and perspectives can cause a problem. Eclipse is really a framework for running plugins. If you have an open view, the plugin is definitely active. For instance, SVN History, when active, polls the repository. Other plugins have their own ways of consuming resources when merely active.

I've found that running with all the default views converted to quick views helps in two ways. One, the whole screen is easily given over to the active editor. Two, plugins tend to de-activate when configured as quick views.

It'd be nice, though, if Eclipse could actually bother to release an installer for Windows. Being just given a zip file seems really unprofessional and amateurish. I'm also not particularly a fan of the whole 'workspace' folder, nor how Eclipse fails to properly set files to 'hidden' on Windows for hidden files.

Please. It's not like the Eclipse developers give a damn about Windows users or anything. Be glad you get a zip file.

Being treated like a second-class citizen (and their unfailing reliance on GNU tools that I hate) is pretty much why I avoid Eclipse and stick with Visual Studio.

Quote:

Or get bigger ram. Or clean up HD. Or defrag. Or stop other processes. Or reduce the workspace. etc etc etc.

How come amongst all the Eclipse bashing no one has suggested IntelliJ IDEA as an alternative? If you think NetBeans is an improvement over Eclipse you'll be amazed by IDEA. Without doubt the best IDE out there. In a strange way the interface is intuitive, when you think I wish it did X it turns out it does, and using the key strokes you think it should. Sounds like I'm gushing too much but if you've not tried it you really should.

What has bothered me in the past, and has held me back from using it more, is that it seems to get swapped out in Windows. Every morning it appeared slow as mollasses to switch to existing tabs or perform other common operations.

Yes, applications that are not used get swapped out on Windows, even if there is nothing to swap in instead of them. Then what happens is that data simply has to be re-read (bad enough already) or much, much worse, Garbage Collection triggers and operates on memory that has been swapped out.

My workaround is to manually trigger a complete garbage collection before starting to work. Once that has finished, all your data should be in memory again. This is not really much faster, but you don't have the annoyance of constant pauses.

Probably a problem with your system somewhere. We use Eclipse with Quad-Core machines running just fine. At home it also runs on a Dual-Core machine, again just fine.

May be, just may be, if everyone else manages to run something ok, perhaps there's a problem with you machine...?

Maybe, just maybe, if a program runs okay on some peoples machines, but slow as hell on a huge number of other machines of all makes and models (that can handle most other programs with zero problems)... it's the program's fault. It might not be a UNIVERSAL problem with the program, but a problem indeed.

The horrible amount of clutter in the UI is my biggest turn off. Having 6 menus that expand ALL the way to the bottom of my screen is rather asinine.

It'd be nice, though, if Eclipse could actually bother to release an installer for Windows. Being just given a zip file seems really unprofessional and amateurish. I'm also not particularly a fan of the whole 'workspace' folder, nor how Eclipse fails to properly set files to 'hidden' on Windows for hidden files.

I disagree 100%. Having the .zip file makes if very simple to install eclipse without an administrator account (very useful in tightly controlled "enterprise" networks), and also makes it simple to use multiple versions, to uninstall the ones you don't want, etc.

Why in the world did you want an MSI file? Do you want it to create some registry keys for you? Do you want it to take over the file association for ".xml"? Are you missing the desktop shortcut?

If they remove the .zip file, I'll be making angsty posts on forums asking for the .zip file back.

Maybe, just maybe, if a program runs okay on some peoples machines, but slow as hell on a huge number of other machines of all makes and models (that can handle most other programs with zero problems)... it's the program's fault. It might not be a UNIVERSAL problem with the program, but a problem indeed.

Still doesn't hold up. I've used Eclipse on P4's and its still been use-able. Not that you would want to, of course.

KitsuneKnight wrote:

The horrible amount of clutter in the UI is my biggest turn off.

Then turn it off. Nearly every UI element can tweaked, pulled, exploded and re-arranged. Spend some time and make ityour UI.

KitsuneKnight wrote:

Having 6 menus that expand ALL the way to the bottom of my screen is rather asinine.

How come amongst all the Eclipse bashing no one has suggested IntelliJ IDEA as an alternative? If you think NetBeans is an improvement over Eclipse you'll be amazed by IDEA. Without doubt the best IDE out there. In a strange way the interface is intuitive, when you think I wish it did X it turns out it does, and using the key strokes you think it should. Sounds like I'm gushing too much but if you've not tried it you really should.

Cost most likely. IDEA is great, but its full version price is pretty steep ($600 for a commercial license) compared to free. For non-commercial use, IDEA is pricey, but much more reasonable. There's also the community edition which is missing a lot of features compared to Eclipse/Netbeans+plugins.

Nah, I realy like eclipse when working in java. After a large time working with eclipse I tend to miss a lot of it's features in visual studio 2010. Especially auto-importing of namespaces/packages, simple auto-added brace closures etc. It's the simple things that make me want to use Eclipse.

Maybe, just maybe, if a program runs okay on some peoples machines, but slow as hell on a huge number of other machines of all makes and models (that can handle most other programs with zero problems)... it's the program's fault. It might not be a UNIVERSAL problem with the program, but a problem indeed.

Runs fine for me and for pretty much everybody I've worked with for the last 8 years.

You need plenty of ram but other then that I haven't had any issues. You just have to remember it is an IDE, not a text editor. Loading all that meta data takes time and memory.

KitsuneKnight wrote:

Having 6 menus that expand ALL the way to the bottom of my screen is rather asinine.

I just installed Helios and only one of the main menus takes up more then half the page height on a 1600x1200 display.

Still doesn't hold up. I've used Eclipse on P4's and its still been use-able. Not that you would want to, of course.

Just to add my own anecdote to this, my Quad Core 8GB Mac Pro can't make Eclipse snappy. It's not snappy when it first starts up, but leave it running for 12-24 hours and you end up waiting a second on simple operations like changing tabs. At that time I have to restart Eclipse. Using the rename refactoring? Every character takes about a second to type.

I even followed various guides online as to how to give Eclipse more RAM, switch from 32 bit to 64 bit JVMs, tweak the heap settings and so on. It helped but Eclipse is still, without contest, the slowest application I run. It makes Photoshop seem like a screamer.

Joel_B wrote:

Then turn it off. Nearly every UI element can tweaked, pulled, exploded and re-arranged. Spend some time and make ityour UI.

Which brings me to another gripe about Eclipse. Why, oh why, couldn't they have used standard platform keyboard shortcuts? I routinely press Cmd-M to minimize the window and instead some random component disappears inside of Eclipse. Then I have to search for one of the half a dozen 'expand/minimize' widgets littered around the Eclipse workbench to get it back.

And what's with Ctrl-A not jumping to the beginning of the line and Ctrl-E to the end? Programmers like to rely on the keyboard but that requires applications to adhere to standards. Nearly every application on the Mac supports this properly, in text views and text fields alike - even my web browser.

Joel_B wrote:

KitsuneKnight wrote:

Having 6 menus that expand ALL the way to the bottom of my screen is rather asinine.

You must have a really small screen.

I have a 23" screen and I still feel like I must almost maximize Eclipse to get a comfortable editor area given all the clutter strewn about the main window. You say 'well then just disable those UI widgets'. I don't want to and I shouldn't need to. Their design could have been much more compact and with fewer knobs and buttons all over. Move all of the rarely used functionality to menus. Don't have a meaningless status bar at the bottom. Every piece of the UI does not need to have tabs on top of it. And if you must have a toolbar on top of the window at least make it a standard platform toolbar so that it looks part of the window frame and therefore does not draw the eye as much with its metric tons of little icons. And so on.

Obviously, I still think the benefits of Eclipse outweigh the drawbacks when working with Java. The various refactoring operations, paste a traceback and jump to definition operations save a lot of time despite Eclipse's speed. For every other language I use Textmate because when you're editing code, having to wait a second to switch to another tab just becomes unbearable.

I think a lot of you guys need to remember that the goal of the Eclipse project is to create a development platform, not just an IDE. If you are just looking for an IDE, Eclipse is good, but you may want to look elsewhere. Once you start creating your own Eclipse RCP applications, you will start to understand (and be thankful for) many of the design decisions and configuration systems, though.

Yes, Eclipse is an IDE, but its true purpose is to serve as a framework for creating powerful, cross platform applications. If you are just writing plain old Java applications, you will probably find it less than efficient.

I love eclipse and I use it almost every single day for at least the last 4 or 5 years. I love the fact that I use it for SQL and Ruby/Rails development at work on windows and go home and develop C++ and sometimes use QT Designer (which BTW is EXCELLENT) on linux, and it works the same. I love the fact that I've replaced 2 running applications with one and I don't have to play the stupid silly upgrade game. And what I am referring to is using the Data tools instead of the MS SQL management studio and the Visual Source Safe application, please don't laugh I have no choice at work and am working to change this. Not only do I have two less applications running but I also integration between the two and better more flushed out features such as diffing in VSS or accessing multiple SQL server types. It was actually quite nice, recently one of our company servers updated to MSSQL 2008, well if I wanted to access I'd have a pain in the ass time upgrading from MSSQL 2005, all I did in eclipse was get the most recent JDBC jar file and POOF it worked.

I really have a hard time believing people that gripe about eclipse speed, I've used eclipse on many a different hardware, from a P4 to a quad core with 6GB ram, both windows and Linux, both in VMs and bare metal, never a problem. I think the only time I had a problem was enabling CDTs complete indexer instead of the quick version and dealing with 10K line files and way too many header files.so I honestly just don't get it, I know it's not perfect and has it's faults but to claim that it takes a second to change tabs , and I assume you mean on the editor, is something I have a very hard time believing.

I have a 23" screen and I still feel like I must almost maximize Eclipse to get a comfortable editor area given all the clutter strewn about the main window. You say 'well then just disable those UI widgets'. I don't want to and I shouldn't need to. Their design could have been much more compact and with fewer knobs and buttons all over. Move all of the rarely used functionality to menus. Don't have a meaningless status bar at the bottom. Every piece of the UI does not need to have tabs on top of it. And if you must have a toolbar on top of the window at least make it a standard platform toolbar so that it looks part of the window frame and therefore does not draw the eye as much with its metric tons of little icons. And so on.

What works for me is having a floating, undocked set of Views. This then lets me have three vertical panes (Package/Navigation, Editor, Outline/TaskLists) and my Problems Undocked. This lets me have a full height Editor, even on a MacBook screen (13", widescreen). And none of the Menus are long enough to get to the bottom of that screen. (Even the right-click menu doesn't get that far)

I've had my share of issues with Eclipse, but I keep using it because it's the best thing around for Linux. The new version feels pretty much the same so far, though I haven't really played around with it enough to know for sure.